Technical Field
This application relates to network management generally, and in particular, to diagnosis and debugging in cable distribution systems.
Background
Monitoring content distribution systems can be difficult due to the size and extent of networks and their components. For example, cable distribution systems reach many locations, including remote and sparsely populated areas, and individually maintaining and monitoring all of them can be a costly and non-trivial task. A technical failure in one component can affect a large extent of the network, and locating the cause of the failure can require substantial information gathering and diagnosis effort.
The difficulties of network monitoring in turn complicate the rollout of upgrades and new software to network components. Testing new releases in a real-world environment risks causing costly failures, and therefore developers may need to spend substantial effort ensuring software is deploy-ready before releasing it on the network.